Beacon of culture, heart of darkness – What Weimar can tell us about holding back fascism

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

News, Government, Politics, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

• It’s Podmasters’ 10th birthday! Get an extra 10% off a year’s Patreon backing. The German town of Weimar exudes a dark fascination, and not just because Hitler loved to visit it. How did Germany’s cultural capital – home of the Bauhaus, Goethe, Schiller and the doomed inter-war experiment with democracy – also become one of Nazism’s earliest strongholds and the location for the Buchenwald concentration camp? Why did the Weimar Republic fall? And can it really teach us how to hold back fascism in our time? Historian and journalist Katja Hoyer tells the story of the town and Germany through the lives of ordinary people in her riveting book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. She talks to Andrew Harrison about how Germany’s beacon of culture became its heart of darkness – and the lessons of Weimar for today. • Buy Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund the podcast by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Andrew Harrison. Audio production by Robin Leeburn. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Artwork by James Parrett. Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:04.7	Music money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Hello and welcome back to The Bunker, your morning ration of news, politics,
1:08.2	current affairs, and occasionally history as well. I'm Andrew Harrison.
1:12.4	Today, the Weimar Republic occupies a terrible place in modern European history.
1:18.2	An ambitious modern liberal democratic constitution designed to replace the Kaiser's failed authoritarianism.
1:24.2	Weimar failed, and its collapse was used by the Nazis to discredit the very idea of democracy
1:29.0	itself. But a few of us paused to recognise that Weimar was in fact a town, Germany in a nutshell,
1:35.3	a citadel of arts and culture in Thuringia, which was first chosen as the place to deliberate
1:40.4	that new democratic constitution and which then slowly succumbed to fascism to the extent
1:45.6	that by 1932, the novelist Thomas Mann could say, Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom.
	...

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